


Music of the Spheres

by Saucery



Series: The Genderfuck Collection [7]
Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Acceptance, Alien Gender/Sexuality, Asgard, Bisexual Character, Bisexuality, Body Image, Courtship, Daddy Issues, Deception, Disguise, Dysfunctional Family, Exhibitionism, Flirting, Gender Dysphoria, Gender Identity, Gender Issues, Genderfluid Loki, Genderqueer Character, Gods, Internalized Misogyny, Intersex, Intersex Loki, M/M, Machiavellian Plotting, Magic, Manipulation, Marriage Proposal, Odin's A+ Parenting, Other, POV Third Person Omniscient, Secret Identity, Seduction, Self-Acceptance, Self-Esteem Issues, Senses, Sexual Fantasy, Subtle Daddy Kink, Superpowers, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-10
Updated: 2014-06-10
Packaged: 2018-02-04 03:40:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1764355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saucery/pseuds/Saucery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A young Loki takes to visiting Heimdall.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Music of the Spheres

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Te (Teland)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teland/gifts).



> Set in an alternate universe in which Loki has always known about his parentage. He has come of age, but only recently.

* * *

 

“Does it ever bore you?” Loki asks, the echoes of his footfalls announcing his presence, although Heimdall has, naturally, been aware of him long before Loki entered the gleaming chamber where Heimdall stands. “Watching the endless cycling of the stars, and the dull, stupid struggles of millions of beings, as futile as the wriggling of worms on a hook?”

“They are not as futile as they seem,” Heimdall murmurs, as a pair of bear-cubs on Midgard chase each other around a tree. Elsewhere, in Hel, ravens tear out the organs of sinners, and in Alfheim, a lone elf sings as she bathes in a waterfall. The sweetness of her melody mingles strangely with the raucous cawing of the ravens, forming a symphony that is somehow haunting rather than discordant.

“Really?” Loki sounds skeptical and, more dangerously, interested. It typically bodes ill for the subject of Loki’s interest. “I would not want a power such as yours.”

“Do not lie to me, child,” Heimdall chides, mildly, while a flock of doves is released at a Midgardian wedding. “You want every kind of power you can possibly have.”

Loki laughs—short, startled, delighted. “Very true. Can you see into souls, too?”

“No.” Heimdall runs his thumbs idly up the hilt of the sword he holds before him. “Mercifully, that is a sight I am spared.”

Loki’s tone turns harsh. “Are you implying that mine is the sort of soul you wouldn’t wish to see?”

“Once again, you insist on turning upon yourself a blade that was not intended for you to begin with. Do that often enough, and one day, you shall die by that blade.”

“Spare me your platitudes, old man.”

“I am yet younger than your sire.”

“My _sire_ , as the pretender calls himself, is older than some of the nine realms. It is no achievement to be younger than he.”

“Have a care, princeling. ’Tis not far from treason to proclaim the king a pretender.”

“It’s not far from treason upbraid a prince, either.”

Heimdall inclines his head in acknowledgment. His attention is caught by the slow blossoming of a dying star, a bright, glittering red in the darkness of space. It is as though blood is pooling around it, like it would around any warrior struck down on a battlefield.

There is the restless tapping of a boot against stone. “Do you _ever_ look at people when they talk to you?”

“I am looking at you.” He is. He knows that Loki’s eyes are alight with a peculiar speculation, and that his smirk has an oddly hungry edge.

Loki snorts. “Allow me to correct myself. Do you ever _face_ the people that talk to you?”

Heimdall sighs and turns around, narrowing his focus to the palace alone, assured that Hogun is manning Asgard’s outer gates, today, and that Heimdall can afford a few minutes of inattention, especially at the request of his prince. When he completes his turn, he finds—to his extremely unusual surprise—that the Loki in front of him is a woman, tumbling hair and lushly rounded hips. The speed of the transformation is admirable; most sorcerers are incapable of magic so swift that it deceives Heimdall’s senses. “Excellently done,” he says.

Loki smiles. “Do you find my form pleasing?” she asks, glancing up at Heimdall through her lashes.

“No more or less pleasing than I find any other form.”

“You’re such a bore. The castle guards were flatteringly voluble in their appreciation of my… assets. Until they found out who I was, of course. At which point they reported me to my father.” Loki’s face twists. “Are you not also going to condemn my dishonorable use of magic?”

“What is dishonorable about it?”

“That I should choose to emasculate myself by donning the body of a woman.”

“Being female is not shameful. And you are not male to begin with,” Heimdall says, gently. “Are you?”

Loki stares at Heimdall. And stares. And stares. And changes back into a man. “Don’t be daft,” Loki growls, roughly. “This—this is but a game. A woman can be no prince of Asgard, let alone some deformed creature that is neither man nor woman.”

“Loki,” Heimdall says, growing concerned. He had not expected Asgard to breed such self-contempt in its children. While Loki is of Jotun heritage, he has been raised in Asgard’s royal palace, and to turn one against one’s own self is a sin. Nay, not only is it a sin, but fostering self-hatred in a volatile Jotun adolescent already predisposed to trickery and violence is strategically unsound. “You are not deformed.”

“And how do you fathom that? Have you been watching me bathe, as I have allowed none other to watch me since I was thirteen?”

“It is no choice of mine that I can see and hear all things,” Heimdall says, hoping that his calm will disguise his prevarication.

It doesn’t. Loki is a consummate liar, after all, and he recognizes duplicity with ease. “Oh, is that so? You didn’t _choose_ to spy on me. I don’t suppose my loving father mentioned monitoring me at all times, lest I do something traitorous? Particularly after I started learning magic?”

Heimdall falls silent. He cannot outright lie. He… does not lie.

“How comforting,” Loki says, shakily. “So, when I imagined I was afforded privacy in my nakedness, I was being observed all along?” A sick pallor sweeps Loki’s features, and he sways, reaching out a hand to steady himself against the wall. “You must have told him ages ago. About my—about how I have matured into a freak worse than a monster. That does explain his distaste for my feminine incarnation. And for me in general.”

“I did not tell him,” Heimdall says, and that is the truth. “I assumed you would choose to tell him yourself.”

“Are you mad? You think that I would willingly confess to the _Allfather_ , man among men, that I am what I am?”

“You are his child.”

“No. I am his duty. There is a difference.” Loki lifts his chin. “What did you report to him, then?”

“Nothing. You haven’t endangered the kingdom; hence, I have had nothing to report.”

“I’m not sure why I find that unflattering—even insulting—but I do.”

“Would you deliberately endanger the kingdom?”

“I’d like to be _a_ danger, yes. Not necessarily to the kingdom, but to anyone that judges me, demeans me, or makes less of me.”

“If that is the case, you are a danger to yourself.”

Humor grudgingly returns to Loki’s expression. The corner of his mouth twitches. “Oh?”

“Veritably, you are the greatest danger to yourself.”

“Listen to your words, Heimdall, for all that you listen to everyone else. Words like those are why you resemble an old man. Even my father, grand orator that he is, fails to wax lyrical quite so _earnestly_. You actually believe what you’re saying, don’t you? In that lovely, patient way of yours, as if you were giving a beloved son advice.”

“I have no son.”

“Nor wife, I gather.” Loki changes again, but it is a slighter change, this time, with subtly curved hips and an absence of breasts. This is Loki as he genuinely is, and Heimdall blinks, because it has to be significant that Loki has never previously been himself— _and_ herself—in the company of another. “I am capable of being either husband or wife, as you desire. Or both.”

Oh. Loki is visiting him with the purpose of courtship. Heimdall is reminded, yet again, of why his mother had once cautioned him to remember that his farsight could not peer into people’s hearts.

Or their minds.

Heimdall is, at least, a soldier; he realizes that gaining the favor of the Bifrost’s sentry would be no small advantage to a person of Loki’s ambition. Loki’s interest may or may not be a ploy.

Indeed, this entire conversation—Loki’s distress included—might have been a ploy, in that Loki is clearly clever enough to have guessed, much earlier than he professes, that Odin had ordered Heimdall to observe him.

The thought that Loki has trusted Heimdall with his secret for years—or has sought to manipulate Heimdall through said apparent trust—is dizzying.

“It seems I’ve shocked you,” Loki says, amused. “Whatever you’re contemplating, I can assure you that my plans are not _that_ well-plotted.”

“They very likely are,” Heimdall replies, dryly.

“You would not be certain of that unless you were certain of _me_ , but you are, aren’t you? You’ve witnessed every moment of my life, and you haven’t turned away, no matter what I did or what I was. Perhaps you understand me best of all—how I lied about the pranks I played when I was five, and how I cried when Thor’s friends called me a Jotun invader, and how, at fourteen, I touched myself with terror and curiosity when my lower half insisted on bleeding as a girl did, _and_ stiffening as a boy did.”

Loki steps closer, but the air does not warm between them, for he has an ice-giant’s blood in him and can warm no-one, unless it is with illusions. That Loki has reserved the reality for Heimdall is simultaneously humbling and alarming.

“You must have seen me tempt both Fandral and Sif away from their lovers, last month,” Loki continues, “for all that they were fucking a false body. A male body. But you accept what I truly am, don’t you? You do not despise me for it.”

“My acceptance is not uncommon. On Midgard, there are several cultures where those who transcend the two genders are worshiped, not disdained. There are worlds in which you would be unremarkable or revered. There are worlds in which the very notion of masculinity or femininity does not exist.”

“Are you encouraging me to migrate?” Loki asks. “That _is_ a novel approach to declining a marriage proposal.”

“You—” Heimdall is momentarily speechless. “A marriage proposal.”

“Reflect on it, would you?” Loki rises up on his toes and kisses Heimdall, and though his lips are soft as vair, his eyes are sharp as knives. “I prefer to get what I want without having to force anyone.”

Heimdall regards him implacably. “None can force me.”

“But I can make it difficult for you to say no,” Loki whispers. “ _Very_ difficult. As you were commanded by Odin to never look away from me, I can ensure that you see me pleasuring myself for you, saying your name night after night, until your ears ring with my voice, my pleas, my screams. Your composure might be nigh-unshakable, Heimdall, but I can shatter it. I can shatter anything.”

“The Bifrost cannot be shattered,” Heimdall puts forth, because all other responses have fled his mind. Loki is near and slender, his in-between shape sensual as a note of music, seductively sleek and strong, his gaze heavy-lidded and filled with promises. Heimdall can consider him a child no further.

“Then I shall prove to you that it can be, if that is what it takes.” With that semi-threat, Loki departs, not deigning to leave by foot but simply vanishing, until only his scent and his laughter remain, lingering tauntingly in the air.

Heimdall immediately knows that Loki has reappeared in his bedchamber, and is undressing slowly before the roaring fireplace, its warmth making Loki’s skin as smooth and golden as apple wine.

But Heimdall is not defeated so easily. He returns to his post, crosses his fingers over his sword, and opens his consciousness to encompass the universe, so that Loki’s beauty is merely part of a star-studded whole, and nothing singular.

It keeps Heimdall from dwelling on whether Loki would be velveteen under his hands, whether Loki’s hisses would be serpentine, or whether Loki would hate being treated kindly, and would instead demand utter ruination, flushed and desperate and tear-stained.

The star that was dying is now but an ember, distant and cooling. The elf that was singing is now curled in sleep around an infant, and the wedding on Midgard has long since been sealed with a kiss.

 

* * *

**fin.**

 


End file.
